5 ways to use Google Analytics and make your SEO life easier

Google Analytics is one of the most valuable sources of information we can have to easily identify SEO opportunities, make decisions and optimize the sites we work for.

Nonetheless, with so many functionalities if we don’t use its customization features, the work of analyzing relevant data can be sometimes time consuming.

This is why I would like to share 5 different segments, visualizations, reports and alerts that help me to analyze organic traffic more easily and faster:

1. Mobile Organic Search Traffic Segment

Create an advanced segment for your Mobile Organic traffic like this:

With this segment you will be able to identify the landing pages and keywords that bring you organic mobile search traffic and verify if these are the same than the ones from organic desktop traffic (you can also create an advanced segment for it, excluding mobile traffic and compare):

You can also use it to easily visualize and compare your organic mobile traffic trend with the general organic traffic of the site and identify if there are opportunities focusing more on mobile users:

2. Branded & Non-Branded Organic Traffic Segments

Create a Branded and a Non-Branded Organic traffic segment, eliminating and only including brand terms from the keywords correspondingly. For example, here we have a segment for organic traffic excluding brand related keywords:

If you have too many brand keywords you can also use regular expressions to filter them. The purpose of these segments will be to identify the impact of the brand over organic traffic and how it relates to the traffic that is brought by the terms you are working with in your SEO process.

We can also create additional segments for the most important keywords or top keywords we’re working for and another for the rest of the keywords (and the long-tail) to also compare the trend and behavior of users that use them to reach the site, identify which convert better, the seasonality, the pages visited, etc.

3. Not Provided Organic Traffic Segment

Another useful advanced segment to create is the one for the “Not Provided” organic traffic:

If we cannot obtain the keyword information for these visits we can verify which are the pages that are attracting them and compare their related metrics with the rest of the organic traffic. Like this we can better understand what was the intention of “not provided users” when visiting these pages and possible opportunities to expand or reorganize our content offering, for example.

We can also create another segment to exclude “not provided” traffic:

By using this segment we can visualize more easily, for example with the “term cloud” option, which are the most important keywords bringing organic traffic for the whole site, a section, category or set of landing pages:

Or by going to the “Goal Flow” report, to identify which are the top keywords and how they impact the site’s goals achievement:

4. SEO Custom Reports

By configuring a custom report that includes only organic traffic with the KPIs we really need to track the SEO process (like visits, bounce-rate, pages per visit, number of conversions and conversion rates for landing pages and keywords) we can save a high amount of time, since we can access it directly or share it:

We can also configure the report to be sent by email as often as we wish and avoid entering to Google Analytics to follow-up:

5. Organic Traffic Decrease Alerts

Finally, a functionality that can really save us a lot of time and maintain us updated about the organic traffic activities of our sites is the Google Analytics Alerts, that we can set by going to the desired profile configuration.

We can define the criteria we want to use to trigger the alerts, that can be a decrease or increase of a metric number or percentage from the previous day, same day the previous week or year and apply them to a specific advanced segment that we have created (for example, a decrease or increase of a specific percentage of visits or conversions just for organic traffic, organic mobile, organic non-branded, top landing pages, top categories, top keywords, etc.):

Thanks to these different Google Analytics functionalities I can develop an SEO traffic analysis and follow-up much more faster. Which are yours?

Hi Richard! Yes, thanks, you’re totally right… great comment 🙂 If you have a large amount of not provided, since it can be also from branded traffic if you’re setting the non-branded one (or vice-versa) you can end-up with branded data there too that can distort the data you get. Cheers!

3. Not Provided Organic Traffic Segment – Thanks for this, Aleyda! I have this site I’m working on and the (not provided) keywords’ traffic is too damn high. I’m honestly nowhere good enough with GA and your article has definitely provided me ideas on what to do.

Thanks so much for this post Aleyda. Definitely the best explanation I’ve found for adding an advanced segment for Branded and Unbranded Organic Search Traffic. Really appreciate you taking the time to share.

Thanks for shsring your ideas on how to use Google Analytics well Aleyda, I am newbie and signed up with Google analytics just recently, when I looked at my dashboard, I really do not know where and what to look, that is why I am in search for a good post that can give me the best way to use this. Thank you so much once again.

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